Waters of Mars

[rm]

"You're only 27-years-old."

Yes, Torchwood fans, that's when I started crying. Tell me I wasn't alone.

"Oh this bloody job never gave me a chance." Oh HAI THERE TORCHWOOD REFERENCE.

...

Oh CRAZY CRAZY TEN HUBRIS. NOW YOU ARE THE MASTER's PERFECT BOYFRIEND.

Also, seriously... CoE parallels. Once again Doctor Who making what happened there much, much easier to live with, because it provides the act and the context for Jack's actions and the consequences of him having chosen differently. And wow, the Doctor so can't deal with Jack because he hates himself.

I love the degree to which we feel the Doctor really needs to regenerate soon, because he's become dangerous.

There are so many echoes of so many weird things in here... including the Ood.

Also, who else is utterly, completely, totally convinced, like from the second the Doctor start monologue-ing about about how Adelaide inspires her daughter that Jack is absolutely, definitely, descended from her.

Hey, close up of the TARDIS central column -- that's a goddamn film spool in the middle moving up and down. HOW GREAT IS THAT AS META? FUCK ME THIS SHOW IS RAD.

Oh, Doctor, you've done a very bad thing.

Also, hello, channeling Nine. That's some rad acting there, DT.

I know cannon will never tell us but is this why the Doctor couldn't step in re: CoE or is CoE why he went and did something dumb like this or did CoE happen because he did this shit? Because I really feel like while TW addresses Doctor Who explicitly, Doctor Who can only address Torchwood implicitly, and IT'S RIGHT HERE, KIDS.

Ood! I called it, Ood! (they really are the best fucking thing the new series has brought us). Ood!

Also, not only had Jack better be there for the regeneration, I have to say, that while we'll never (we hope) get a permanent Doctor death in canon, in fanon, my feeling after this episode is that Jack _must_ be there when the Doctor does finally truly die, because it is the only way to resolve the control/comfort/time dramarama shit between them.

OH MY FUCKING GOD, PEOPLE THIS IS WHY I WATCH THIS SHOW.

Comments

[torenheksje.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad you got to see this. I was stunned thinking how the Doctor always treated Jack like a monster because he *can* walk away, when in fact it's the Doctor himself who is standing in front of the Giant Maw of MonsterMadness because he *can't*. And they both pay a terrible price.

I canNOT wait for December.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

I canNOT wait for December.

That's certainly true. Whatever other opinions people may have on WoM, End of Time looks to be epic. Plus! Simm!Master with some strange timerifty thing happening to him? Lucy? Wilf & Donna? I see no bad here.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Are there people out there who thought WoM sucked? Because dude, IT WAS SO RAD!

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Certainly someone I know from college, and follow on Twitter, professed not to like it at all.

OTOH, there may also be overlap between those who disliked COE and those who disliked WOM.

[rm.livejournal.com]

That's what I was wondering. I suppose people who hated it are very possibly the people who think Ten is less dark than Nine, but I've always thought Ten was TERRIFYING.

[morinon.livejournal.com]

I've considered Ten to have less of a heart than Nine since Christmas 2005. Nine would've given more than one chance. Ten doesn't have the huge guilt than Nine had, he doesn't have the PTSD, and now, he's watched all his friends leave him one way or another and he's lost touch with the moral grounding that gave him.

Ten has become scarier and scarier as time has gone on. Because while Nine would do horrible things from guilt, or personal issues, Ten does them from self-righteousness. A man who is sure of his righteousness is FAR more terrifying than someone who merely thinks he's doing the right thing. You can reason with the latter.

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

...I think Ten does have PTSD, which would explain some of what happens in "Runaway Bride" and WoM. Though yeah, a lot of self-righteousness. And I think we're seeing again that he needs a Companion to call him back from the brink.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

OMG, Ten was certainly terrifying in this. Yikes. Next to him, Nine has always seemed positively well-adjusted.

[raaven.livejournal.com]

Dude. The people who think that Ten is less dark might consider going back & watching Family of Blood again. I think that's the point at which I finally got just how dark Ten is...and then was able to see it better in earlier eps.

[phaetonschariot.livejournal.com]

Depends why they disliked CoE - personally I did because I thought it wasn't Torchwood, it was a political thriller with the TW characters shoehorned in and acting completely illogically. WoM, OTOH, I thought was brilliant.

[jigglykat.livejournal.com]

I thought it sucked. I'm having difficultly explaining it, because I *liked* the concept. I just thought it was poorly executed.

[rm.livejournal.com]

See, that I'll listen to (the Dalek thing-y was a big narrative fail re: JE, I'll agree, and I thought we'd had so much amped up fuckery by the time Adelaide shot herself it was weirdly anti-climatic (I wanted her to steal the TARDIS and go back and nuke herself) and you can't tell me that everything worked out okay because she died on earth instead. I mean... if that turns out to be the case (if, and I doubt this, because DW never has the continuity I want, this ep gets mentioned again), then I will totally be in the haters camp.

I think my big allergy is that I feel like a lot of people are just gonna be "it's too dark" and then not discuss it. And that would drive me mad (hi, still feeling the CoE afershocks).

I wanted to know a lot more about the Mars aliens.

[jigglykat.livejournal.com]

I'm going to rewatch it when elrina753 and pay more attention (and keep my snarky commentary to a minimum). I just had this huge disconnect with the episode (I also had a disconnect with CoE because I found out my dog was going to be put to sleep halfway through power-watching it so I felt absolutely nothing for the characters by the end). But no, I find dark!Doctor to be interesting. It's been building up for a long time. Just... the plot and pacing of the episode felt so off to me. There was a LOT of filler stuff for an extended episode that didn't need to be extended, you know?

[rm.livejournal.com]

The pacing seemed wonky to me towards the end too. I'm sorry about your dog. And that you sort of missed getting to have a CoE reaction that was just about CoE, regardless of what it was going to be.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the Adelaide Dalek flashback fill-in-the-backstory was too long.

I actually thought she might shoot the doctor.

What I don't get is he easily could have taken them to some point in the future several hundred years and as far as history knows the timeline was still intact. Everyone still gets inspired and the 3 of them get to live. He didn't have to get all cRaZy about it. How does taking them to Earth preserve the timeline at all? The future never would have rolled out the same...

They'd have been happy to just be alive, right? Having Adelaide as a companion makes more sense...

And if he's going to screw up the time line lets save more than 3 people, okay?

Gary http://GarySaid.com/

[elionwyr.livejournal.com]

What I don't get is he easily could have taken them to some point in the future several hundred years and as far as history knows the timeline was still intact. Everyone still gets inspired and the 3 of them get to live. He didn't have to get all cRaZy about it. How does taking them to Earth preserve the timeline at all? The future never would have rolled out the same...

This.

re: Adelaide as a Companion
I thought that's what was being hinted, but I don't think she'd ever have gone for it. Though she'd have been interesting in an almost Romana kind of way.

[littlebelleblue.livejournal.com]

I think at this point he didn't care about the timeline any more - if he had taken them to a point in the future, he wouldn't be crazy!Doctor, he'd still be respecting the rules of time, whatever those are. The fact that he thought he could and should just insert them back into their own lives, consequences-and-logic-be-damned was, I think, supposed to be an indication to the viewer that something is really, really wrong here, and he isn't quite operating with a full bag of marbles.

He looked like a big puppy, wanting to be given a pat on the head for saving the day, as opposed to saving them because it was what should have been done. He wanted gratitude, and that was truly scary.

And yeah, I was wondering if she was going to shoot, too.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

This.

He does with them exactly what he does in Pompeii. He yoinks them out and deposits them safely back into society. Which, in Pompeii, he does get rewarded for.

[littlebelleblue.livejournal.com]

Plus, in Pompeii, there was no internet, etc. The family could have just said they were on a day trip or something and no one would have questioned it. Or they were the smart/lucky ones who chose to run in the right direction and not stay and try to salvage valuables. There were survivors at Pompeii, so I think in the long run, it wouldn't have mattered if four more random people escaped. As opposed to a nuclear explosion where nobody was supposed to have lived.

So, in Pompeii, it was something that could be safely rewarded.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the Adelaide Dalek flashback fill-in-the-backstory was too long.

I actually thought she might shoot the doctor.

What I don't get is he easily could have taken them to some point in the future several hundred years and as far as history knows the timeline was still intact. Everyone still gets inspired and the 3 of them get to live. He didn't have to get all cRaZy about it. How does taking them to Earth preserve the timeline at all? They'd have been happy to just be alive, right? Having Adelaide as a companion makes more sense...

And if he's going to screw up the time line lets save more than 3 people, okay?

Gary http://GarySaid.com/

[smirnoffmule.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I have absolutely no problem with scary Ten, with dark material, I loved CoE, I just didn't feel WoM was very well put together. I was having one of those watching experiences where I was just itching to get my grubby fingers on the script and do some tweaking. Wouldn't change the content, but, yeah, I think they could have sold it better.

[natf.livejournal.com]

I'd rather this did not cause any flaming for her but a filker/knitter/writer/USian-living-in-UK RL friend of mine said this. There was actually quite a lot of non-likers on twitter. Their loss. I loved it!

[rm.livejournal.com]

I didn't fall out of love with the Whoniverse after CoE (which I really liked over all), but it was very hard to feel as intensely as I did due to its events and interact with a fandom that was spinning about in it's own freak-out that was obviously similar but felt entirely alien and weird and impossible for me to deal with. Sometimes it still is. Thank god I have f2f friends in the fandom who can sort of glance at me across a room and give a little nod of acknowledgment when it's clear something's caught me oddly.

But this, this was so... why I watch this show, why it's personal to me, why I think it's fucking art! And you know, I'm going to babble on about it, everyone else's issues or feelings about mine be damned!

So yes, I am glad I got to see it, and I am glad you said that to me, because that's the textual version of that little nod, and I appreciate the little nod a lot.

(incoherent much? me?)